It's a mistake to link a day's strike to mourning for the lives lost in Newtown, Conn.

The union suggestion that Ontario’s striking public elementary schoolteachers wear them this week — whether on the picket line Tuesday or in the classroom — is tasteless and self-destructive.

I don’t know what’s more startling, the teachers’ dopey willingness to damage their own legitimate cause or the heartlessness of their even slightly appearing to claim a special link with the 20 dead children of Newtown, Conn. in a week that includes a day when they’re withdrawing their care of Ontario students.

Parents are scrambling just before Christmas to find a place for their children on a Tuesday when teachers, out of self-interest, won’t have them. And parents will drive past a picket line and see black armbands? I do hope not, for the sake of Canadian public civility.

Martin Long, president of the Toronto chapter of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, is the one who sent the memo out to teachers on Sunday about wearing grief on their sleeves, after ETFO chief Sam Hammond tweeted the suggestion on Friday. “We were just incredibly devastated by the situation,” Long said.

An armband suggests a great deal: tragedy, a possibly hamfisted attempt at compassion, blurring of jobs and job action. Long denies that the armbands will politicize the deaths. But Long clearly doesn’t realize how the strike — plus black armbands — will be perceived, or how it will be used by enemies of the union.

Black armbands? “In this culture,” Long told Star reporter Laura Kane, “that’s how we mark mourning and sympathy, in situations such as these.”

But it’s not. In the United States, school shootings are a thing, like President’s Day. They happen frequently.

So what are Ontario teachers saluting? “Their own sadness” might be one reason, Long says. But I’m not wearing an armband and I’m sick with grief over those kids. Call me insensitive — which, teachers, you tacitly are.

If I were an elementary school teacher with a righteous cause — which, by the way, they do have — I would wear the armband on the days of the week I was noton strike, and I would be cautious about wearing them in class without permission from higher-ups.

It’s a tough decision whether teachers should answer questions from young students about the latest American mass killings, and the arm gear will puzzle and perhaps scare kids. Their parents may have taken care to protect them from the news. Children talk amongst themselves. Conservative parents with guns might well object to the matter being discussed and then teachers, as usual, are in the soup.

As for school shootings, Ontario teachers might well have publicly mourned the day the Conservatives killed the national gun registry.

But no, by wearing an armband for Newtown, teachers are making a choice. What they may not realize is that voters will remember that they made that choice on a strike day.

I say voters because I remain aghast at how clueless the elementary teachers’ unions are about what they face should the provincial Tories, led by Tim Hudak, win power over the Liberals they despise.

The Conservatives openly loathe unions and have vowed to bring in “right to work” legislation if elected, by which they mean “right to work cheaper.” They dislike teachers as much as I like them and respect their right to join a union, to strike, to defend their pay.

You would be unnerved by the Conservative mail I get — mostly angry rural geezers frothing about taxes — denouncing teachers, I guess for earning a decent living doing one of society’s most valuable jobs. Yeah, that must be it.

Teachers, you are handing those voters a gift.

Those American teachers who threw themselves in front of the Newtown children, volunteering to protect those tiny kids who still had to be shushed as they chattered away about Christmas gingerbread houses while the killer approached?

They did what any good teacher would do. Inappropriate armbands smack of militancy, not grief. They’ll just make teacher-haters think of the warfare to come, and that’s the last thing you and I need.

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